


glindiakarmâkho

by bodysnatch3r, catadromously



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Cuiviénen, Multi, The Ainur - Freeform, The Avari
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25940329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r, https://archiveofourown.org/users/catadromously/pseuds/catadromously
Summary: When the elves first awoke, they found a world rife with magic, silent and ready to be discovered. Between their awakening and the first summons, they explored, discovered, learned.In a world as young as it is raw, they discovered the line between nature and magic, and began to understand their place within it. Mostly, they learned how to sing.The art is by the absolutely incredibleTaishe. All of her work is stunning, and working with her on this has been pure joy.
Relationships: Aikarwâhsiti (OMC) & Mahtan Aulendur, Aikarwâhsiti (OMC) & Mahtan Aulendur & D'râktari (OFC) & Mahtan Aulendur's Wife, Aikarwâhsiti (OMC)/D'râktari (OFC), Mahtan Aulendur/Mahtan Aulendur's Wife
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9
Collections: Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang 2020





	1. glindiakarmâkho

**Author's Note:**

> A note on the transliteration of Kwendjâ, the form of Proto-Quenya used throughout: the letter "j" indicates the semi-vowel which in Quenya Tolkien transcribed as "y". 
> 
> A full vocabulary list, in addition to my sources, is provided at the end ("chapter 2").

* * *

There _was not_ , then, and now _there is_.

A simplicity of birth that lacks an answering, an unnamed way of waking. There was not. Now there is.

Where there is no sun there can be no clouded comfort. No beauty of the curling of the wind, no blanket of darkness torn apart by light, ripping past the grey and into well-depths of earth with a terrible tenderness only a parent can know.

But there isn't the sun. There are the stars. And this is all a world that begins in no darkness truer than the one it already inhabits. It is in darkness after all that all great wise ones learn the blood-deep names of things.

There is no absence: you cannot miss what you do not know. In the endless twinkle, new names for things find easy root of bioluminescence. Where no light, no matter how bright, is light enough to feed and nurture, the world has found its ways to make its necessary living.

For them, it begins in silence. Even though the world had been born in song. That song had been given a voice and the voice had been heard, and entire cosmogonies had been invented and established in the time it took for it to be sung. And in that world now all that remained of the song were its traces: the curvature of a stream, the sharp beak of a bird, the rhythm of footfalls, the rich brown earth, the breath of creation. Not yet dancing, but soon. Not quite ready for a dance. Not just the learning, but the spark of it, and waiting.

The dancing had been until then the province of gods or almost-gods, and now that the song was over, the silence needed space to breathe for an instant, before something new came, and something new filled it. Light, in the footfalls of wind, cracked open by the leaves as it spilled from the stars to the grass through the branches of trees not yet spoken. Not silence at all – birdsong, the breeze through clustered yew and quickening oak. An animal calling for its mother. A world stopping at the inhale and waiting to exhale its newness into being. Against the grey backdrop of the Firstborn Children the feather-light smoke of a beginning made fleshy by the novelty of creature. A world welcoming its first eyes of intelligence. A world that sung, but did not have the words for speech. Not yet, not yet.

But soon.

When he opens his eyes for the first time this is all he knows: there was no other time before this and time begins now though there is not yet a name for it. This is _beginning_ , even though there is no word for beginning that he knows whether another knows or not. There is just the word he has, himself, inside of him, that blossoms like dark flowers in between his lips:

_Jthti._

When he opens his eyes, there are fires above him, so small they are like the breath of a newborn hare. Up, someplace that is not _here_ , and might be _above_. Beyond. Beyond, in the darkness. He has no word for darkness.

 _Elenî_.

That word comes unbidden, hand in hand with the idea of thought. The first word he felt, in his chest, something bloodied and coursing through him. The second was of the blood, but elevated, pressed above his ribcage and just out of grasp. Not just a blood-song but a _concept_ , an extension beyond the self and into the viewed world.

He raises his hands. Against the backdrop of the light beyond them he catches pathways in his fingers like rivers and valleys, dips and turns where the veins meet skin, where the skin hides bone underneath. Beyond his fingers the things he now knows are called _eleni_ sing their song of bright dead light and he lifts his hands and there are veins but they are also rivers

( _kelun_ _î_ )

and from above the red of his blood is rapids-white, the earth-rich colour of aliveness.

His world for now is him below the light. But there is something else, starlight-bright above the sight but below the stars, between him and the fire of their nature. Green. Green ( _laikwâ_ ) leaves ( _lassî_ ), green that shimmers and shines as much as the stars do.

The sign embraces signifier. In his mind that is slowly awoken-learning-understanding the world has still no shape beyond the fog before deeper understanding. He has nothing of boundaries, barely anything of roadworks already sketched but still solidifying, coagulating, _becoming_. The boundary between in-side and out-side is not yet solid enough to be a proper confine. Parts of the world leak through, drip from his hands to his throat to his self, inner sanctuary, sepulchre of something unnameable and yet needing to be known. Desperately.

Whatever is around him bleeds past simple definitions of the physical: an understanding has begun that does not yet demand a full translation into word-concept. This the first tentative step along the endless plane of aware existence, and there is no other body that he can see beyond his hands which he has not yet named and the stars whose first name he knows now and the leaves which are green in the shape of green only semi-darkness can spell out, to eyes that, for now in their first few moments of awareness, only know eternal brightness, jewels in the darkest fabric of sky,

( _tl_ _i_ _mbo_ )

that means “canopy” also.

A half-world. Made like one makes the shape of the hallway after dark: shadow-bound, struck in a comforting dark blue stillness, shapes of real things pressed against the grey-black like muscles moving underneath the skin.

His hands, then, are not yet named. In his language inside him, he has not yet found a suitable significance for something that he only knows as _him_.

Perhaps, then, he should begin to move.

After all, he knows himself as simply _jithti_ , but already there is the notion that to begin is not enough, and one must continue, and perhaps connect. There is only so much he can understand by himself.

So he moves. He sits up.

She is already standing. He looks at Her. There are others, too. All around them. He could not hear them when he first awoke but now they are here, present, and they are part of the world, _His_ (their) world, melody building above melody. Each one he sees becomes a different spark, and fills his chest. Where light cannot be found except for far above He finds it here, also. He finds it with the _kwendî_ above all.

But she out of all of them is the closest to him in the space. And when He looks, he sees that She is looking back.

She is naked, like him. In the starlight her body shimmers, and in her reflected flesh he feels his own suddenly heavy, solid, and he looks past his open palms and sees arms, a torso, and legs, a chest and a penis and thighs, dark-skinned, like hers.

He is body, and he is not just mind.

She walks closer, crouches down, across from him. In this sudden closeness he sees her eyelashes and the cracking of her newborn lips that have not yet tasted water, and he wonders if he is the same in this, too. He lifts his unnamed hands and touches his nose and then the mouth beneath it. If he tries to touch his own eyes to find eyelashes he discovers it hurts.

She says nothing. She watches. Bright dark eyes. She will gift them to their son.

She takes his hands in hers.

This is not the first time in this sung world that a body has touched another body. They are the Tatyar, second-found, and the language of touch has already been practiced elsewhere, but unheard of and unfound, by them, and so unknown. Here therefore touch is a newest-born thing. And it is boundary-raised: his body finds shape because with touch come confines and therefore the shape the self inhabits as concept of space hereafter. Now He is not just word or thought, he is flesh now, because he is in her hands, and he finds the expanse of skin as a new paradigm against which to understand himself.

She speaks, the first word of their new world, and it is boundary-lifted: she holds his hands which he did not know how to name and speaks them into concept, into reality beyond the simple touch of things.

“ _Makh_.”

She smiles, as she speaks. He feels his face begin to mirror the gesture. It drips upwards, against all logic and all gravity, into his bright dark eyes, like hers. He will gift them to their daughters.

This does not have a name yet.

* * *

Others awoke with Her and with Him that day that was not a day at all, not marked by any rising or falling, the stars still and solid and set in the sky, and they met them and they called them siblings. Amongst them, some already knew how to be named when they first opened their eyes. Others did not, and were learning with great difficulty and trust the knowledge of themselves that they would need for Names.

The world was so raw, so ever-growing despite the beauty and the supposed perfection. Their eyes so wide with wonder in the finding and the learning. It was a sister-process, a slow rising to meet the other half: the land all around them did not know its words for itself either, and asked these firstborn children to allow it to be reflected back to itself through them.

They said yes. And say yes every day since, a symbiotic growth that sees them learn and understand the brighter ways in which this world can, will, grow. He is there with it to learn, and so is She. They have a Friend, his hair the colour of the berries that are sweet, his skin light and star-kissed along the neck and shoulders, along the bridge of the nose. He likes working with his hands and was one of the first to discover his Name: he found it in the cracks along the riverbed when it yielded red clay to him and he made the first _sukmâ_ , so that drinking would be easier. He made it with his hands. He calls himself Makhtân. The words of the Name marry the thought of the Self, the way the Self can be known only as a continuous Awakening, again and again as the pieces of the world trickle through them, knitting themselves into the shape of reality with their eyes as guide, their tongue as path to meaning. Though boundaries grow into shape and every slow breath makes it easier to remember where _makh_ is, where lips ( _peñû_ ) are, where heart ( _idê_ ) lives, it is an understanding wilfully, necessarily incomplete: it is made to be remade, and then ever-broken and re-built, over and over, a cycle of discovery. It is a twig that bends to reveal bitter sap, the way the skin peels back like bark that reveals fleshy pain and corkwood in the tree. The sap drips. The corkwood can be used. There are breathing holes all through this fleeting fabric of awareness, this boundary still unwilling to wring itself into full shape, and it itself has already promised it will last only for as long as it will be necessary to understand the shadows of each other, a touching of foot to grass, leaf to skin. Then it will be like an understanding of the child in the womb: but there are no children born yet. No body has had to learn the motion of their lungs because they listened to the rushing in their bearer's body. There are no bearers, yet: creation a gods' act, an act of nature reflecting the divine. And so their names are only one. They found their _kilmethê_ before any other name, because there are no sires and no bearer-parents to gift them an _amalethê_ or an _atûethê_. And they have seen too little of the world to feel the need to define themselves by an _epethê_.

Makhtân, so sure of the red clay on his white hands. Used to shape a cup to drink the river from, and then another, and another, used to shape the shape of his own name. In the dark already whispered and formed. Assured. But He would never want to know himself already firstly-born. He turns to a rock to seek out its name, and asks the pale glowing worms beneath it what their thoughts are of the riverbed below the sloping hill. At the beginning he thought maybe the world knew more than he did and he should therefore ask it to know, wait for answer, and then learn. But the world was as newborn as they were. The world did not know: that brought Him more joy than if it had.

While Makhtân made vessel the red of the earth, his companion, who awoke already knowing their own shape of Glindithe, taught Her how to knap the flint. Makhtân used grasses from the end of the wood, where the trees thin slowly, to make knowledge take the shape of cloth. In the fibres themselves the most ancient singing. Motifs of colour, of texture and of thought. They had very little to tell, but already the patterns spoke of awakenings and learnings. And the patterns did not need the words they were still forming. The patterns told what there was to tell with their own shapes, own language, own discovery. In images of stars and trees. In images of hands that meet.

Glindithe laughs, a sound already _so_ common in this new beginning. They toss their head back and they laugh, and She laughs with her friend, beside the fire Makhtân is tending to. He smiles. Orange dances, between the four of them: leaps from the side of His jaw to the green of Makhtân's eyes, to the thick braids of Her hair, to Glindithe's gapped teeth. They've pricked their finger, and yelp: red rises to the surface. They suck on it, but the fibre is already stained. She picks it up and takes over the work of sewing the two pieces together. Glindithe tries to take it back, but She bats their hands away, and Glindithe scoffs, and the smile doesn't leave their face.

By the fire, as She sews and He whittles and Makhtân stares into the flames, it is Glindithe who starts this song. They let it rise through the white colours of their teeth, past the red of their lips. It had happened before, and it will happen again.

Each time it is a different story: about the foraging, the earth they felt beneath their feet, the words that She had found in sweet-smelling grasses and had told them about. Speech meets melody and makes song: bit by bit, it grows in the canopy above them. Others join in, and some clap. Each voice a different strand: what sights they saw, what thoughts they had, what paths the stars led them through. Each cycle brings new moments to it: beads added to an ever-growing necklace that they are ready to carry with them, coil over coil, around the heart and lungs.

Somewhere along the horizon there will be the silent shapes of newcomers so similar to them, caught in apparition against the backdrop of the sky, the dark, beautiful sky, that kisses this sea of murmuring grass beyond the trunks of trees. They will follow them, and learn the World's other names.

* * *

His hand presses to the ground soft as the skin when it slips off the bone. Behind him, Makhtân with his head turned skywards, with his head tilted back, tracing the patterns between stars with a finger pressed to the dip between the bottom of his nose and his upper lip.

”They will not come down for you, no matter how long you stare.”

His friend doesn't answer. In his green eyes the reflections innumerable, shaping within the confines of the irises new waves to crash against the rock of the dark pupils. Under his breath, tracing new names for new shapes that appear to him beyond the canopy of leaves. Words in a dream.

He raises his head, not to the stars but to the green around them, still unknown, and stands from crouching down, using the staff he's carved. The ground here, soft, dirt left underneath his nails, the smell brown and rich and ever-permeating. He turns again to Makhtân and he clicks his tongue, nudges sharp with his head, and his teeth are white in the dark of his smile.

“Mîna-â.” _Let's go._

Makhtân points, his other hand on his patient friend's shoulder. He follows the upwards gesture with his eyes, but it does not end where he thinks it will. It stops just barely below the beginning of the branches, at a tree standing patient and still underneath the limitless weight of its own slowest growth. Makhtân's grip tightens.

There are eyes in the bark. The tree stares, and they stare back. It blinks. He feels the smile he gave Makhtân split his face in two, bright, bright, his cheeks aching, and he turns to Makhtân who is not smiling, but the light of the stars he caught earlier has not left the twinkle of him, and he swallows. A tree can see. A tree, _this_ tree, with the face of an ancient thing, that has found them or perhaps they have found it.

Underneath every rock, the worms and the dirt can tell of great endless cities just beneath the soil.

They turn back towards the tree-who-is-watching. It has not moved, and if it's noticed them it does not say it has. But the low rumble, that they hear, and it rises: from the bark like a crack of slow thunder, from the branches like an interminable gust of wind. The leaves tremble, and then the tree-with-eyes stands. Roots spring from the earth to greet its footsteps, a mother reaching out her hands to hold her newborn child's feet in wonder, and when it reaches Him and Makhtân, it leans forward to watch them closely, and watch them well. In this world magic-made still allowed to burst forth unrepentant, unhidden. Still, the world new vibrant in its beloved endless night, in stretches of time with no meaning and no thought to them, undefined because unneeded, covering the trees and fields in a darkness as endless as it is comforting. The air and the rivers awoken with the thunder of voices and tongues, each language a meaning to itself and of itself, a song-cycle held within the field that shines brightly. And they, the firstborn children, who long to grasp them all in their own mouths.

In Him eyes that will be ancient find eyes of a creature already too ancient to be named, something that stands before these two young children of the stars with a face lined in bark-speak and memories viscous, endless, sap-sweet, and it watches. It watches, and they stand as they are watched, still in a creaking young world. They know they are breathing only because they feel the bones in their chest murmur low.

The low rumble comes through the roots this time, and the eyes do not blink as the birds in the branches take flight. They will return eventually, and bring story and song. In their language of trills will the _kwendî_ learn to speak across great distances.

The tree-that-moves turns to Makhtân. It is a long time before Makhtân presses a hand to his chest, and speaks.

“Makhtân. _Makhtân_.”

His own name, spoken, now, for the first time, to someone not of his kin. In the quiet wood, the power of a name expressed, strung high to bleed its meaning to the grass to nurture it. It is everywhere, now, caught and lifted on the wind like ash and hope, climbing up towards the tree-who-is-watching, to speak to it even if it does not understand.

There are words in these woods nobody has yet been made to know.

He is the first to sit down. Slowly. He feels the movement in his knees and ankles. He lays his staff across his crossed legs. Makhtân glances to Him as he moves and then follows him shortly after. Their watcher does not. Their watcher watches.

”Can it speak?”

”Not Kwenjâ. But I think it still can speak.”

“So we must learn.”

“Yes. And we must teach.”

Makhtân turns his head, towards his friend. His smile, answered in kind-ness.

”Do you think it will work?”

”Makhtân, my brother, I do not know. But I will not leave until I do.”

Were time a concept they could understand it would become soon unneeded or unknowable or both, because sitting here under the green-brown eyes of their new companion, there is no grammar that could fit the intricate underbrush growing beneath their tongues, no ways to describe the ever-slowing sweetness of the wind. The breathing is song, the twittering also, birdcall across the ever-walking trees, that move an inch a day, that grow strong in darkness.

Closer than any of them has ever gotten, He watches the old face and the old bark. A beetle, green and glowing faintly, ambles its way from the lips to the bridge of the nose, and then takes flight, its wings bright, luminescent. He watches it against the back of leaves and then it disappears.

He turns towards Makhtân again.

”How do we teach him? I do not know what tongue he speaks.”

Makhtân shrugs, and He scoffs at his friend with that same light sound the beetle made as it took flight. He looks in that quiet face. The eyes, bright, do not leave room to move. It is here, and it is making them here, too, inevitable, tied. Drawn. They would not be able to leave this place even if they wanted to, even if the sky split open and the sun became a thing to see.

He and Makhtân have made a promise regardless of the outcome of it, to themselves and in doing it amongst themselves to the world also. This was the covenant their people made when they awoke.

To teach. To learn. To see.

”Brother, do you have your drum?”

”I do, Makhtân.”

He reaches for the drum bag that is attached to his belt. The watcher's eyes turn to His hands.

Rhythm is something they learned from the heartbeats, the footsteps. Rhythm, like deer's hooves against the riverbed through the water. He starts light, spreads a leisurely beat Makhtân can construct a melody around, and his friend's low voice fills the gaps between the stars.

It is a list. The words draw out their shape through vowels, consonants, a tongue to the space behind teeth, to the teeth. Makhtân's throat, open and vibrating: the mouth of the fox, the birthing canal of language. It is every word they know.

He joins in with the words he has discovered but not shared yet, which catches a glance from Makhtân and a smile. The smile that makes the words shift slightly in their shape. The laughter He can feel reverberate between the diaphragm and lungs.

And when they are done, they start again.

It is on their third time around that He hears the rustling. From every side, as more and more trees draw near to listen. He feels their eyes, bright, all over him, digging through the melodies they're making with a sharp interest and a slow patience. The first one they met has not moved, and neither have they. They have gathered, on the edges all around them, but they have not come any closer than their tree-with-eyes. A glance to Makhtân tells Him he's noticed them, too. But the melody does not trip.

It is on their fifth time around that He hears the creaking. Similar to the one they heard when the tree had first moved, but deeper and darker and thicker in its intent and with direction, and the creaking grows, and like a river finding the curves in the rock and carving itself in the shape of them, the tree's voice joins the elves'. There is no true distinction between the words, no pause for breath, no shape to the melody beyond the overarching sketch of it. To the quick voices of Him and of Makhtân, the tree's singing is a low drone, a creak of wood and bark to hold it. To the ancient, patient voice of the first of the Shepherds of Trees to converse with an Elf, their quick, impatient singing is squirrels, scrambling along the branches of their trees.

At the end of their list, He and Makhtân fall quiet. But the tree does not, and adds a word of its own, for it and for its people: _onthrimb_ _ê_.

* * *

She learned to move by the way the breeze danced through her hair. In the soft dewy grass her footsteps fall and make no sound, creep past the border of awareness. She flows, and silver bounces with her feet off the back of fish swimming upstream, her ankle bracelets as quiet as a mouse. She is tender in her walking, makes no sound. But already He knows her, and when she walks behind him, the cool water of the creek up to her thighs and then her belly, He is already smiling. She sees the edge of that smile, when she wraps her arms around him and rests her chin on his shoulder.

”You were gone. We sung many songs without you. Six song-cycles. I counted them.”

”But I returned.”

”Where did you go?”

”Deep into the woods. With Makhtân.”

”What did you do?”

”We taught the trees to sing.”

The water sloshes when she circles him, when she moves to stand in front of him. She tilts her head. His eyes are closed, and his smile has not left his face. When he opens them, he finds her, staring with that look of hers, that hunger.

”Next time, I will come with you.”

”We used the melody you taught us.”

She doesn't answer, but her eyes are still dark and still on him.

”With words? Did the trees sing with words?”

He nods. He watches her blink slowly, take that in. She moves again and she leaves wet footprints in the sandy mud by the river. She turns to face him. He does not move, but her hands splay against a tree trunk and she breathes, eyes closed. Her toes that sink into the grass.

”Do you think they have the words inside them, like we do?”

She hears him move and step outside the water. On the tree, against the bark, she sees his hands cover hers, and feels his chest against her back.

”I do not know. And we do not have all the words inside us.”

”We have the spark. We have the ways we look and know what Name things must have.”

”Yes, and then we argue until we cannot even remember what we wanted to call it in the first place.”

She giggles, and he feels it in his chest. He sighs, a hand cupping her cheek.

“Do you hear it?”

She does. To those who do not know where to look, it is just the silence of the woods, the stillness of a bird perching to rest. But they have been learning the darkest blood of things, and it is where the eye is not allowed to reach that they find the truer sound. All around them the forest peels back its inscrutability and shakes it off its ever-growing bodies, a million discarded carapaces of crackling song, under the feet, between the fingers, in the breath that dreams between the _phaja_ and the nerves reticulate like roots.

The red-fur deer walks with footsteps they should not be able to hear. Too light. A breath above the dirt and grass. But they do hear it (as if they were meant to) and it pulls them away from the tree.

He takes Her hand, as the great buck with antlers and a great breathing chest watches them. Its fur, red mottled with brown and the black stripe down the side, the dark shoulder-hump breaking the otherwise graceful curve of its back, its eyes a deep terrible black, and in its head something like the sound of thunder. The buck blinks. Its eyelids close horizontally.

It roars, snout to the sky. _Arâmê_ , loud-sounding, like great hunting-horns or great thunder.

His grip on Her hand tightens, and She breaks free of it. In this starlit clearing under a canopy of trees that sing, a god begins to coalesce. It gathers its root-form in the soil, finds it thick with sweet water and nutrients, digs through the topsoil with its great hooves, its fur the rust-song of blood that has dried, the red of the clay of Makhtân's drinking cups, and in its chest like a heart a kernel of the Ajanglindâle.

It roars again.

She feels it in her chest. In her chest, like the echo. And it _opens_ , where the blood meets the heart where the throat meets the jaw, it opens like a fountain, like the vein when opened, too. A rushing of bright river-red.

She watches. She watches across the starry infinite and sees a creature made of velvet and of antler. It walks towards her with a slowness only gods can have. She does not yet carry the concept of god: but she sees a great creature of the forest that moves in a world where her companion has just spoken of a tree that sung. In this soft stillness that carries time in its arms, a newborn child not yet ready to be shown to any other, the figure of the god walks slowly, and comes face to face with the first prophets that the world has ever known.

The great deer lowers its head to drink from the stream they were bathing in just moments before. The forest bows its head to drink its fill of water, its snout and lips wet when it raises its head again to watch those who are watching it. He makes to reach for Her, but she bats His hand away.

The great bellowing beast drinks once more. She slowly walks towards it, and all He can do is bear witness.

It does not let her come any closer. The buck turns when she is halfway across the stream, slowly, and she stands where it stopped her. It disappears in the woods it came from.

It leaves behind no hoofprints in the mud.

* * *

At first they thought the screams were those of a wounded animal, because no child of the stars had ever made a sound like that before, like a wound torn open in the air.

But it had not been an animal.

He pushes his way to the front of the crowd, the voices of it a babble, trying to make a sense of itself and of what it's seeing, rising and falling in shouts and cries. The screaming does not stop. The screaming asks to be heard. It demands its place amongst the cries of birds, the laughter of children, the sound of water. It broke through the edge of their darkness-with-starlight and brought with it the darkness-of-the-flame just snuffed out.

It is Galdâŋjl, who did not return when the other hunters did.

“How long had she been gone?”

Erjâdi, who is cradling her head, looks at Him.

”Three-- three... song-cycles.”

”We have to bring her to the healing-tent. Glindithe, help me.”

He slips an arm around Galdâŋjl's shoulders, and one underneath her knees. She cries out, again, hasn't stopped weeping that screaming sound. He feels her burned skin sticking to his chest. As people start to follow, She and Makhtân make sure they do not crowd Him and Glindithe as they make their way, and they make sure no one who should not be there comes into the _mar_ _ânbiŋgjatâ_. Erjâdi comes inside, shouldering her way past Makhtân.

He lays Galdâŋjl onto the healer's table. Her hands find His, fingers twisted and broken, trying to make sense of the pain she is in. He is a confine beyond her own body. She has lost the shape of herself: translated into the skin that's peeled off her, the bones that have broken, she cannot remember what she is, where she begins, where the air ends.

She has never felt this. No body has ever felt this.

”What happened?”

Galdâŋjl cannot answer. So He asks it again and this time at Erjâdi. She swallows and does not dare come closer. In the flamelight her eyes sink, her face pulls itself over her skull as a way to escape the horror. Behind her Glindithe finds the plants she needs, and starts grinding them into a poultice. Erjâdi shakes her head.

”I do not know. She wasn't... she didn't _come back_ , and then we searched, and, now-- And _now_ \--”

He follows her gaze where she looks. The skin on Galdâŋjl's face has been burned off, most of her hair is gone in clumps and her scalp shines in the places where the fire has burned its deeper way. Her fingers broken.

Glindithe hovers above the flesh with their cloths and their poultices. Meanwhile, He turns to the gashes on her belly and her thighs. When he touches her she recoils and his hands come back red. Glindithe and Him share a gaze, above the ruin that lies between them.

”Brother, I do not know what this is.”

He has no answers either. His hands are stained red. He finds the needle and thread Glindithe uses when the People gash themselves knapping the flint of their arrows. He looks to the deep cuts on her body.

Her screaming rises.

“Erjâdi! Help us!”

She moves quickly to hold Galdâŋjl down.

He is blind in the face of a pain that has darkened their world. Galdâŋjl has begun shaking, her eyes turned upwards, her mouth frothing. The blood seeps past the sutures, stains the blanket she's lying on and His hands and the ground underneath them. The rich scent of Glindithe's poultice stings his eyes.

Glindithe notices the screams have stopped when He has sewn together the second gash on Galdâŋjl's stomach. Glindithe lifts their hands. Galdâŋjl's eyes stare, but there is nothing in them. The froth at her mouth is stained pink where she bit through her lips. Her chest is still.

The bowl drops from Glindithe's hands and they grab His wrist to stop him. He looks up at them and they look at him and then exhale and shake their head, and he looks at the body. He furrows his brow, he lightly shakes his head. Glindithe presses their hand to just beneath Galdâŋjl's nose. There is no air, not in, not out. Her _phaja_ has left her throat. For the first time something has snapped and the _phaja_ of the People has left the home of the throat and gone elsewhere. He has seen it happen countless times with the prey they kill for food. He knows the _phaja_ will not return.

”Galdâŋjl?”

Erjâdi's voice breaks behind the teeth. She moves and He steps back to leave her room. “Galdâŋjl?”again, as if a Name were enough of magic to undo this.

A screaming fills the _mar_ _ânbiŋgjatâ_ again, screaming big enough to drench the tent and the forest and the plain beyond the forest.

It is not Galdâŋjl's screams anymore.

He steps outside the tent and the People stare at him in silence. She looks at him to find an answer and He allows her no comfort of it, no comfort for it. Makhtân reaches for him. He pushes him away and walks through them in their wide eyes, in their fear, in their incomprehension at what terrible act they have been asked to bear witness to. Like stepping through water in winter if this world even knew what winter was. Uncovered, they are vulnerable, drenched to the bone and he is drenched in blood. Behind him flame-bright Erjâdi's howls frame the first tragedy like fire.

The direwolf sits at the other end of the smoke. He sees it and it sees Him. It stands, and begins walking. He moves to follow it. He hears Her call him, and Makhtân ask where he is going, but in this new, vast quiet of sorrow, the direwolf's footsteps fall with the only sound louder than Erjâdi's screams.

So they walk. The direwolf never stops, but often glances over its shoulder, eyes golden, solid, quiet. It leaves no pawprints in the underbrush but never slips out of his sight. Through the wind and the dark wood of the trees, deeper and deeper until He looks up and the space between the crowns of trees is gone. The starlight is barely a trickle, leaking past what spaces it can find. The only thing guiding him now is the sharp, vibrant light of the plants. He is in the land's dominion now.

Here is a place not even the stars are allowed to reach.

Forest-song starts to bloom. He feels it, the trilling of the nightingale, in his bones in shapes of a prayer, and it answers the way his heart picks up its canter, deeper then. In the blood he feels it, in the throat where the _phaja_ dances, in the feet and the belly. It is a sorrow, too, and knows itself for what it truly is: it is a death. It has not told Him its name yet, the truest Name, the one He has not found yet for himself, but his hands are stained in Galdâŋjl's blood and in her screams, and here it runs like quick shadow around him. He hears the galloping footsteps and the snarls, the yipping noises of the pups, the louder laughter of the young ones. The deep despair cannot be soothed: here has come the end of the days of simple bliss.

They walk until the bottom of His feet bleed. They walk until the trees become of stone and the light of the world is as far as the caves run deep.

When the direwolf stops, it stops and turns for Him. He stops, then, too and the direwolf sits, and He sits also, on the damp mossy rock with his knees bent and his elbows resting on them. Somewhere water drips, like drums. Through the covering of leaves thick as stone the starlight of lost things is spelling out unknown words for hope and death and life.

“Did you bring such Shadow to my people?”

The direwolf bares its teeth.

”It was the Western Kings.”

”What is a King?”

”A master. A Lord. A keeper of dark things. We have no Name for it. But it has taken our children too and has broken them. Rends them-hurts them-breaks them. Its servant comes in the shape of us and it _lies_ and when they return to us they are not-right.”

The direwolves around them, hidden by the shadows and the wood and the stone, snap their jaws. Their ears pulled back. Their spit drips down their fangs. In this moment of rage it is the land wounded by this marring of it that the snarling carries. He catches glimpse of those snarls in white teeth.

”Who are you?”

”By my people I am called Ankâ Maikâ, and amongst my kin I am Nethâ-sj-gljltadê. My brother told us of you and of your kind, after your meeting in the woods. Who are _you_ , aikarwâhsiti?”

He looks at his hands. Galdâŋjl has seeped beneath his nails. She has stained his palms and forearms. He clenches and unclenches his fists.

”I am of the People. Who are these Western Kings?”

But perhaps the question was not one that needed an answer so simple. The direwolf's eyes tell him as much. He is young. He has much to learn.

”The People? _Whose_ people? They came with a storm and a flame. Through fire and wrath, into a great burning. They have hurt this land and they will hurt it more.”

The direwolf uses so many words he had never heard before: _wrath_ and _hurt_ and _break_ and _storm_. But language is the eldest part of him that knows, and in that deep bone-red knowledge the terrible truth is undeniable: even the pain sometimes must come as necessary. They are creatures awoken, not birthed, and they are creatures immortal, not dying: the pain they must learn on their own. Language like black-branch, like necessary wound: the direwolf speaks, in the darkness she speaks, under the earth where he has come to hear her song, and she gifts him not comfort but answers. He asked, and that was when his walking began, following this creature into her caves. Here He has come beneath the earth to listen to the Dancer speak Himself back to Him-Self.

” _Why_ did we wake? What happened to Galdâŋjl?”

Her blink is slow. She answers one question. Not the other.

”We call it _wanwê_. Your hunters gift it to the children of Jawante every day. Illness gives it to us also.”

Black-branch burning. Sometimes the words can shatter in the mouth: shards sharp and dark obsidian, bitter, bitter. Death doesn't taste like anything at all. Death makes his stomach turn. Death makes him scared. In the belly of the earth, beneath the waters of the sea of Khelkar death is understood as an away-going, an un-return, and he does not know how to hold it, to make it make sense, to shake it so the rattle makes a noise he can listen to.

“But it was _unfair_.”

”So many things are, little child. Come.”

The Dancer lifts herself again and walks with no speed and yet relentless seems to run, black paws for blacker soil, dust of starlight. Where there should be footprints there is only the noise of footfalls, the speed of blessed things with music in the inside of their bones. He does not not know if they were ever in a cave at all: the dreamt patterns at the top of the rock ceilings so similar to stars. But the dripping of water against stone continues. And if He stands his shoulders and head brush against the bioluminescent lichens, but still the paradox persists: the ceiling is as tall as the tallest trees he's sung beside. These snatches of understanding: like the language this space of meeting exists in has been shifted enough for him to understand it enough to learn from it. But whatever language Nethâ-sj-gljltadê's people speak in, whatever howls and roars and soft, green mosses, in all His explorings and teachings, all his conversations held with rocks and dirt, here those teachings fall short of making any more sense beyond the baseline, the base surface. He is looking at the reflections in the water, and cannot go deeper. His lungs can only breathe air.

Nethâ-sj-gljltadê runs, now, and he must run fast to keep up with her. His feet bleed further, if he turns he sees his footprints staining the grass and stone. She does not glance over her shoulder anymore. She leaps, and then she is gone.

He stops with a stitch in his side and the air wheezing through his nose. He wakes and the soles of his feet still hurt. He wakes and the blood is still staining his hands. He wakes and he is alone and the grass is wet and he holds deep silence tight against his heaving chest. His knees and his hands sting, skinned. Perhaps he has crawled. Perhaps he's run on all fours beside the the Dancer and had tried to rend the true meaning of dying from the uncompromising earth that had yielded and re-birthed him. The first dead _phaja_ they loosened form the riverbed of song, discordant, interrupted note, song-cycle denied conclusion. Galdâŋjl lies still and quiet (dead) and wrapped in a shroud Erjâdi and Glindithe wove even if they did not know how to end Galdâŋjl's song.

There was nothing they could make melodious, no harmony that worked, no way to properly convey what this silence meant: this silence with no birdsong and no wind-chime. This silence that was absence. Their bodies nurtured and born in song: the terrible nothing of a silence they had no knowledge to describe. Here, they are lost. Children confronted with the illogical holiness of an earth born marred: a melody lost can be found again, but the world now knew what death meant and it was nothing that could be undone. A going-away that was permanent: a throat without a _phaja_ to sing.

The shroud was only finished halfway: it only covers Galdâŋjl's torso, the rest of the body exposed, an open wound, the raw blood of a world now less certain. She lies between two roots, curled as if sleeping. Her unmoving chest, stiff hands, legs tight against herself. The world has found a mirror the _kwendî_ did not know and is relentless in holding it up to them, and demands they hold it with it, too, and what knowledge pools at the bottom of their eyes stares back at them with jaw unhinged. The dead-song/dread-song is not melody, it's scream.

The world is marred, and starlight does not stop the terrible from mingling with beauty. What can be allowed to happen now began with flowers that were lain beside Galdâŋjl's cuts and hands: a testament of love, to love, carried beyond death into the deep earth that will slowly cover her as she rots. Those flowers will slowly decompose. From them new ones will bloom. Long after the Sundering, where once stood the _et-kuiwênen_ a fawn one day will pass and see them. And she will not know them beyond the sweetness of their stalks and petals, but at night they will sing in her dreams with Galdâŋjl's soft voices and will tell of a shroud half-finished, and the dreams will weave themselves with Erjâdi's and the fawn in the sunlight will sing Galdâŋjl's memory in song.

Because wrapped in the roots and the fabrics as she is sung to rest, Galdâŋjl was loved.

He wakes. The cloth beneath his cheek is scratchy. It is a slow movement upwards: consciousness does not break the thin surface of the water of his mind until he shoves it, until he presses himself beyond it. The surface tension broken, it pours firelight down his mouth and nose, and he blinks, once or twice. He is lying in the _mar_ _ânbiŋgjatâ_ , and his feet do not hurt. His elbows do not hurt, nor do his knees. He looks at them: unscathed, unmarked. As if he never wounded them at all. He expected pain or the sting of an ointment. Someone cleaned Galdâŋjl's blood off his hands. He blinks again. He chases light from his face with his fists, pressed in his sockets until the darkness behind them twinges. Someone (She) takes those hands and peels them back. He opens his eyes, and finds her face and eyes of witnessed history. She is alone. They are alone.

She watches. Her eyes are always too sharp not to make the watching matter.

She traces the bridge of his nose with a knuckle.

“How long?”

”Nine song-cycles. Galdâŋjl died and you came out of the tent, and then you began to walk but your legs did not hold you. And you slept.”

She moves her hands again and touches his chest through his tunic, touches his hips and his throat.

”Your _phaja_ left though your _srawâ_ remained alive and none of us knew where you had gone.”

While Her hands cannot be still, remembrance of life and death, His are as heavy as boulders in his lap, though he lets her find them and hold them and kiss their palms.

”I met the Hunter's sister.”

She lifts her eyes to find his, where there is no trace of a lie. Wherever he has been, he returns with truth to match hers in the riverbed and the unblinking eyes of a great buck's roar. She swallows and lets go of his hands which he lightly rests on her shoulders.

”How?”

”I went to the heart of the woods and at the centre of the earth the Dancer told me of the cruelty of Western Kings. It was them who have brought this death to us.”

She swallows. His palms are warm against her skin and the things he is saying sear blue through her body, from throat to pelvis, through her legs into the dirt floor. He stands, and she steps back to let him do so.

”I have found my Name. The Dancer gave it to me.”

She says nothing. She has nothing to say. Then she smiles. His hands hold the slow rise of her breathing heart, both on her chest.

”What is it?”

“Aikarwâhsiti.”

She holds it now. She spoke His existence into word all those song-cycles before, before they even had a notion of them, when the stars were barely poetry. Before they knew that trees could sing. The syllables dance suspended in particles of dust. She sees them against the grain of the firelight, on her tongue as she murmurs it to herself. _Aikarwâhsiti_.

He was afraid that it would be an ending. That with the Name found, with it would come the silence of a world now satisfied by its own answer. Instead, it is so much simpler in its fit, a part unmasked, a pattern clearer as his hands come into view, as the Dancer spoke his name and called him to the Truth within Himself, in the semi-dark ceremony of this dead rebirth, under the ground, lung-deep in the water, and in the woods and beneath the stars, and with the scents of centuries and gods filling his nostrils like new sap and old wood sweet-burnt. In the caves of magic not to be understood if not within the parameters of flowers buried for love (and nothing more, or less) he had received undeniable the promise of a _kilmethê_. With it, from it, the promise of a wretched, necessary beauty of death as the blistering part of life. Like a new sun, as incomprehensible to them as much as dying in unfathomable pain. Able to be understood only through the deepest letting go.

She had sung of it as Glindithe sung the new grief-magic, from Erjâdi's wailing into the starry sky. Meaning given to an otherwise meaningless thing. Without the weaving of grief and song the People would have succumbed to it. Yet given to the flowers and the breeze and the fawns' stomachs it took upon itself the shape of the only comprehensible alternative to fear: love.

* * *

Beyond the horizon the sky like an untreated wound: open, pulsing, the fires burning relentless past the stars of Otoselenî, swallowed by clouds and by terror. She watches the thunder roll over them, the great hooves of the clouds cracking the surface of the sky in bursts of colour sharp like broken glass. They had never seen thunder before. They had never heard lightning before.

She feels Aikarwâhsiti's hand reach for hers.

* * *

She is not the first. Others have carried new lives inside of them: the body gathered around a kernel within, the ending of _single_ , beginning of _two_ , body within body. Like the earth hides all manners of seeds within itself, so She felt her womb grow heavy with aliveness once she had decided to carry Aikarwâhsiti's child.

In this one act, this begetting, they had both agreed to find creativity _._ The _phaja_ from her throat had slipped into his, and vice-versa, a humming of hearts weaving wonders. _Srawâr_ found and held, hands shaping the shape of their laughter, the act had been like song, like weaving is song, like searching is song, like dreaming. She had pressed the world to inside herself, and the world had taken hold. Her ankles had swum in the earth's green grass. Her body had been Song, and inside it it had begun to weave a song which was its own.

She stands still by the water with the chill of it delicious, up in the back of her heels, into the crook of her knees.

Another crack of lightning, swallowed by the sky through clouds. She no longer flinches when it breaks the stars. The grey torn apart by orange, fire licking wounds of gods-made rage into the fabric of their collective consciousness. A great war is being fought, one they can grasp the meaning of but not the substance of.

She no longer trembles.

The Khêlkr embraces her forearms when she pushes them under, squatting down, drips down her chin and neck as she drinks from her cupped hands. The thunder crawling down her spine as tender as the wolf's bite, and into her throat where her hum blooms. She swallows the water. She presses her hands to the bottom of her swelling belly. The hum fills her chest, rattles the small, tender bones of the mother of princes growing inside her. She stomps her feet: and she builds, slowly, something like a rhythm, through the bottom of the water, through the body of the water, into the soles of her feet and through them into her hips, her belly, her groin, her breasts. In the centre of the blue water of the Khêlkr sea she is like the dark iris in the middle of an eye, enveloped by breathing, by blood of another kind. Beyond the humming and her teeth, through her feet the cold rises to meet the fire of the sky above. In the gathering clouds of god-war she sees arching against the backdrop of battle the melodies of songs of great and wonderful terror, of the awe-some beauty of that which one does not (cannot) comprehend but must love anyway.

Her humming rises. In her, it blooms, blossoms, spreads wings of _ninkj akarm_ _â_ , of _ninkj akarn_ _ô_ , breaks past her mouth with sudden singing, and through her belly the _glindiakarm_ _â_ _kho_ , this little breath of a bigger breath that began before the stars had shapes beyond a goddess' dreams, stops the melody to simply make her laugh. She laughs, her head thrown back, her dreads brushing between her shoulder-blades, and all around her the land joins in laughter, too. She knows the language of this growing grass behind her, the sweet tongue of memories turning to tale, of the meadow woven with itself to make the berry-picker's baskets, and more than anything, deeper than it all, she Knows the Hunter and the Dancer his sister, the Wind-walker and his companion the Star-bringer, the Water-Lord and the Smith, the Maiden and the Bear, the Masters of Spirits, the Healer, the Weaver, and the Fruit-giver.

She found them one by one. Some came to her like the Hunter, silent in the woods with his great horns, and others came to Her through others, like the Dancer in Aikarwâhsiti's words and the Smith who spoke to Makhtân one night through the fire of his kiln. She found them all around her. She found them in the trees Aikarwâhsiti and Makhtân had taught to sing: they spoke of Jawante and she knew her then as tender, terrible mother, with eyes of green and her mouth the wood-carving of her _onthrimb_ _ê_. She knows them as she feels them, coalesced in this dancing, in this singing in a body always devoting itself to an act of creation. Rooted to the water beside which her daughter will be born, above her the Ajanûr tear black the clouds from before the stars: a thundering that snaps the sky in two.

When she kicks the water rises in great sprays, silver-light, like stars a step closer to her hands. It rains back down. Inside Her-self she feels holiness reach up towards the storm to drink her fill of this world, so terrible, so beautiful. Water finds water. Her laughter finds the sky.

* * *

In the woods the scent of blooming fluorescence. Her hand brushes against the flowers, comes away stained with pollen. In the darkness it marks her hands. They shine. She smiles at it, wipes it down on her tunic and thighs. The lightning for a moment casts the whole of it in white. Then it is gone, and the war beyond them is swallowed again by the sky.

Her footsteps are sticky with dew.

She follows the marks carved in the wood, sure as the hands that put them there, reading them. A pattern interwoven with the bark: their presence seen by the forest and accepted, it being told to itself through the actions of the people as a tale it did not know it held. In the bark there are no words, but there are stories enough to tell over and over, each passage enriched every time a new group walks by: information, messages, directions. None of it could have been told to them by the woods alone if they had not been there to mediate. Nor were the woods capable of telling the story all by themselves: the woods did not care for the spaces where the Ajanûr could be most easily found. Nor did they care for the places where the People's song could be sung the loudest. So that part of the tale, this great song of bodies, winds and waters, was up to them to tell, and they had in the spaces the forest allowed them, pockets of moments where the voice of the woods was soft and malleable, easy to sink into, and the words they spelled there with their hands and songs could more easily be taken by the roots to nurture.

They had learned this way of marking passage from the Miŋjâr, the same way the Miŋjâr learned from them how to weave their stories in the cloth, and both of them, the Miŋjâr, and Her people who they called Takjâr, had learned from the singing Neljâr the bird-voice they could use to communicate over large distances.

At the edge of the starry waters, they had drunk from each others' cups, and found a commonality that went beyond the simple nature of their language.

There are new spirals on the trees by the pond, woven with straw and birds' feathers, attached to the wood with thin leather. She brushes her pollen-stained hand against them, and they are marked by the flourescence they leave behind.

In the light clinking of wood against wood in the breeze, the pollen becomes an accent on a single phrase. She smiles. The leaves run their fingers through the wind to sing.

As she walks she sheds her skin. It begins from the bones, outward, like a shape of a thing needed elsewhere. She leaves the sighing of the trees behind, she leaves it in the waters of the pond and the waters of the Khêlkr. And in her feet comes the sinking in the underbrush. In the under-ground her knees dip beneath the earth to find answers to a whispering much louder than the water-song she danced beside, in the song-cycle before.

She follows different footpaths, now. The markings in the trees led her here, but beyond them lies deeper understanding in a darkness thick enough to be unnamed. Aikarwâhsiti would search for it. He would ask the dark to tell it back to him what it would be called now that it had been seen by a _phaja_ in a throat that could sing.

But she never needed names to know the face of things.

The leaves are thick enough so that no starlight can come through. The species here are not bioluminescent. She finds her way by touch and by smell. By following the footpaths she'd followed countless times before, hoofprints in the wildwood, by feeling the dirt under her feet and the rough of the bark on her palms. By scent. By heart. By _heart_.

In darkness all secrets can be told. In darkness can true power be bestowed. All prophets sing in darkness. All dreams are done in darkness.

They were not born in darkness: the starlight made it so. But darkness is where She slices her palm open by accident on a rock spur, and where she trips and feels one of her nails torn off. It makes her yell. It makes her eyes sting.

Inside her her child is kicking.

She stands again. The trees still all around her. The creaking is low, here, the movement a great heaving, a song of whales in air, wood old and older still. The smell is rich in earth and dizziness, she breathes it until her lungs are full with it and her mind is neck-high in the green and brown of it.

The forest lies about her: womb enclosing child. She sits, cross-legged, hands splayed on either knee, in a dark so solid it may speak to her without any words. Here she searches for an act only a few other elves had already had to do: she searches for a name to give the child inside her.

Name given and not found. A definition of unknowns, a way of finding thought before the thought had formed. Aikarwâhsiti had been told his name by gods. Makhtân had found it in the embers. Glindithe had been born with it. But Her self was still silent to Her.

And now she has to find it for her daughter. Language was her companion's world: hers is a fleshy thing, the earth in her feet and knees. Aikarwâhsiti knew the words the _onthrimb_ _ê_ spoke of themselves in, those slow long vowels self-defined, and she knows the ways the deer turn south when the Ajanûr's storms will come. The anchors differ, the rooting in time and through it running parallel and understanding each other across wood-bound paths. Word shapes time, song-cycle made to make the space they inhabit make sense. Glindithe made the song-cycle, and She wove the circles of it further widening, until it caught the stars and brought them down to them in the sparks around the fire.

In the impenetrable darkness. Her rattle presses rhytmically against it. She is aware of the movement of her hand only long enough for the noise to form the first time, and then then that becomes divorced from her, too, and the sound it produces is the only thing it is known for. In the impenetrable darkness. What she hears. Not words. Not any tongue understood. What she feels is the snippet of the music. Ajanglindâle grows like gold waves planted by the seeds in her rattle. In her arms and her back and her bones and her throat most of all.

All around her, great animals of size and shape she will never be able to see, a secret singing of the deepest forest not even Arâmê had told her.

She opens her eyes and dreams.

She sees:

A Tall Lord upon a Great Horse, speaking of the Western Kings as saviours,

She sees:

Twin lights in the sky never finding each other, brighter than the stars could be,

She sees:

Her people encroached by darkness,

She sees:

The suffering of wars upon wars upon wars,

She sees:

Brilliant Lords returning from the West with eyes of terrible fire,

She sees:

Great battles soaring upwards, breaking the fabric of worlds like waves upon rocks,

She sees:

Like a linchpin to her awareness Her people far in the east away from the great wars and conflicts, Aikarwâhsiti fixing their daughter's hand as she draws her bow,

She sees:

A green-wood she does not know the name of yet, wolves running through it with their jaws wide and their eyes the red colour of life,

She sees:

Their daughter running beside them, a star in the centre of her throat. Her head thrown back, her laugh a sharp gutting thing.

She sees:

Nine walkers, and her daughter's son amongst them. Green like spring's leaves.

She sees:

The war coming to their green-wood, and her heart aches though she has not yet danced beneath its leaves.

Lôsien Dream-master walks through her and out of her heaving chest as her hand and the rattle still, and her daughter's child meets Her gaze. For a moment, two songs meet. Then he is gone, son of two worlds.

She wakes, and speaks her daughter's name and then her own.

* * *

”Tulukilja, come.”

She outstretches her hand to her daughter, beckons her to come. The girl, still carrying their torch, nimbly walks across the cave to where D'râktari is sitting, mixing the pigment.

”Set the light aside, come sit.”

Tulukilja does as she's told, setting the torch aside so it still offers light, tucking her feet under herself. Her dark eyes catch the sparks of the flame. Her mother fills a reed with the pigment she's been preparing. Ochra-red, she hands it to her daughter and, while Tulukilja is leaned over to reach, smears the tip of her nose with her paint-stained finger. Tulukilja exclaims, and She laughs.

”Do you know why we are here?”

The child tilts her head aside. She blinks slowly.

”Am I to add my hand to the People's?”

“Yes,” she nods, and pokes her daughter's cheek. Tulukilja giggles and bats her hand away.

In the darting flames, the shadows crawl over the lights, dragging the art on the cave's walls into a dance it moves through in jerky, unnatural steps, newborn trying to walk the ground for the first time. Solid, still bucks become leaping fawns, breaking out of the binding of egg and pigment to find beneath their hooves something as light as air. The foxes run beside the broken dead, and Mandôth the brother of Lôsien welcomes them within his holy _mar_ _ânbiŋgjatâ_. Above them, Maŋgwê, the Eagle, stretches his great wings to embrace Barathî's stars. Beneath the Eagle and the night sky, between them and Mandôth's hall, three elves awake beside a charcoal-black lake.

On the ceiling of the cave, white paint to mimic the great stars: the sky made small, made tight and safe and gathered closer to them. If one follows this trajectory of light, one finds on the wall opposite the one they're sitting in front of the conflict fought by the Ajanûr against the Western Kings. Here those not lucky to be dead are seen again: caught by the Kings, forms turned to ghastly shapes: eyes sharp as wolves', teeth bright as wolves'.

A great war. It rises against the rock in clouds of terrible black and yellows and oranges. Beyond the horizon, seen only as the great storms. One follows slowly the progression of these terrible events, lightly, through a low passageway engraved with birds in flight, leaping from the stone and soaring overhead, following the wolves and the foxes and the deer, the Eagle and its children, until, finally, at the centre of the second cave, the Bear catches Mailikô in his terrible iron jaws and tears the Western Lord to justice.

Tulukilja looks at the Bear's sharp claws and teeth, at his eyes wide with frenzy. The child swallows. D'râktari feels her daughter's apprehension in the way she shifts on her feet and stands back.

”Tulukilja. You have seen this before. You have been here many times. Be brave, my child. The Bear will never harm you.”

Tulukilja reaches for her mother's elbow, since her mother is holding the torch with both hands, and D'râktari smiles at the gentle touch. She sets the torch down in a fissure in the rock, and the flame makes the Bear's jaws clench hard and Mailikô's figure contort in pain and rage.

She gestures to Tulukilja. Opposite the great battling god and King, a wall with Barathî's stars above them: her arms outstretched, her gift of holy light held above them. And below them, stencilled handprints. The colours of the Miŋjâr, the Takjâr and the Neljâr overlap, course into each other. Voices, voices upon voices marked in solid song on the cave wall. Most of the hands are adults', large. But there are, more and more, the smaller handprints of children beside them, below them, within them. Not many, yet. But Tulukilja knows all these children by name, and plays with them every song-cycle: their laughter weaves itself amongst the fabric of the adults' chanting, rolling into the waters and into the woods in somersaults. And they scream shrill with joy, and the adults watch them make the world their own.

D'râktari notices her daughter observing the marks on the wall, and she reaches to wrap her free arm around her small shoulders, forearm across Tulukilja's chest. Her chin rests on the top of her daughter's head. This body that they made, her and Aikarwâhsiti. It came attached to hers, and Glindithe had given her the knife to sever them. Tulukilja's body had held a scar of that severing, in the middle of her belly like a star. Sometimes She blows raspberries against it, and Aikarwâhsiti tickles it until Tulukilja laughs to tears. This _phaja_ though, this was made anew: it came with its curiosity, its likes and its needs, its joys and hurts. It came with the light behind those eyes, and it came hungry for knowing and wanting.

It was made, and made from and with love, and now D'râktari watches it touch the cave-wall through her daughter's hand.

“Like I showed you, little hunter.”

Tulukilja takes the reed and blows into it. The pigment it was packed with explodes in a red cloud, and stains her hand on the wall as she traces its outline with it.

Her mother smiles. With a finger lightly she traces the distance between Tulukilja's handprint, Aikarwâhsiti's and hers. All three now, close and united.

“We live here, always. So that we may remember and be remembered. And now you are here and you sit beside the People in our stone-song.”

She glances over her shoulder, to the Bear, and then leans down to smile, and press their foreheads together.

“And the Bear watches over you, always. Even if he scares you.”

Tulukilja leans her hand against her mother's face. It leaves D'râktari's cheek stained with pigment, and she laughs, and rubs their noses together.

The torch carves sparks into the air, the rich thick smell of burning sap. The Bear roars, and birds in flight remain forever still upon the rock.

* * *

She breathes easier when they are outside. Though beautiful, the caves always leave her with a feeling of empty, of trapped. Outside, where she can feel the breeze and hear the rustling of leaves, she can also feel her feet in the soft grass, and rest easy in the thought of being tight, connected to the land. 

Her mother's hand is warm in hers. They stop by a stream to wash the ochra-red from off their hands and faces, and D'râktari splashes her. Tulukilja laughs, and answers with a splash of her own. The footsteps that come from the woods make both of them turn. Makhtân looks at her but mostly looks at her mother.

"A _khotsê_ has been called."

"Why?"

"Earlier the hunters saw a tall rider come, and his horse was great also. He has come to speak to us. He is not of the People, though he looks like us in _srawâ_. He calls himself the Hunter."

"The Hunter has already come to us."

But in the woods D'râktari sees the Great Lord upon his pale horse, in the deepest heart of the woods, in the deepest dark.

And slowly and inexorable, a reckoning begins to reach for stars. A song of different meaning and of different weight: history sits at the top of the hill and looks her in the eye. And, patiently, it waits.


	2. WORD LIST & SOURCES.

**WORD LIST.**

**Aikarwâhsiti:** blood-stained.

 **Ajanglindâle:** Q Ainulindalë; the music of the Ainur.

 **Ajanûr:** Q Ainur.

 **Amalethê:** Q amilessë; the mother-name.

 **Ankâ-Maikâ:** Sharp-toothed [lit. “sharp-jawed”].

 **Arâmê:** Q Oromë.

 **Atûethê:** Q ataressë; the father-name.

 **Barathî:** Q Varda.

 **D'râktari:** Wolf-queen.

 **Elenî:** stars.

 **Epethê:** Q epessë; the title-name.

 **Erjâdi:** Lonely Bride.

 **Et-kuiwênen:** the Waters of Awakening.

 **Galdâŋjl:** Tree-lover.

 **Glindiakarmâkho:** the song of creation.

 **Gljltadê:** Dancer.

 **Glindithe:** Sweet-singer.

 **Idê:** heart.

 **Jthti:** first.

 **Kelunî:** rivers.

 **Khêlkr:** Q Helcar.

 **Khotsê:** assembly.

 **Kilmethê:** Q kilmessë; the self-name.

 **Kwendî:** the People.

 **Kwenjâ:** that which is of the People; their language.

 **Laikwâ:** green.

 **Lassî:** leaves.

 **Lôsien:** Q Lórien.

 **Mailikô:** Q Melkor.

 **Makh:** hand.

 **Makhtân:** Q Mahtan.

 **Mandôth:** Q Mandos.

 **Maŋgwê:** Q Manwë.

 **Marânbiŋgjatâ:** the healing tent.

 **Mîna-â:** let's go [imperative form].

 **Miŋjâr:** Q Minyar; the First tribe.

 **Neljâr:** Q Nelyar; the Third tribe.

 **Nethâ:** Q Nessa.

 **Ninkj akarmâ:** sub-creation [lit. “little creation”].

 **Ninkj akarnô:** sub-creator [lit. “little creator”].

 **Onthrimbê:** S Onodrim; the Ents.

**Otoselenî:** the Sickle of the Valar, a constellation. 

**Peñû:** lips.

 **Phaja:** Q fëa; the soul.

 **Sukmâ:** cup.

 **Takjâr:** Q Tatyar; the Second tribe.

 **Tulukilja:** Steadfast Star.

 **Tlimbo:** sky.

 **Wanwê:** death.

* * *

**SOURCES.**

Fauskanger, H. K., “Primitive Elvish – where it all began”, <https://folk.uib.no/hnohf/primelv.htm#Heading12>.

Strack, P., “Eldamo – An Elvish Lexicon”, <https://eldamo.org/content/word-indexes/words-p.html>.

Tolkien, J. R. R., “Quenya Phonology: Comparative Tables; Outline of Phonetic Development; Outline of Phonology”, in Parma Eldalamberon 19, edited by Christopher Gilson.


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